Northshore Wood Products uses certified 300-year-old wood from the historic Globe Elevator Company in Duluth.

In 1887, the year it was completed, the Globe Elevator system was the largest grain storage facility in the world. The complex – a 141-foot-high terminal and two storage buildings, each with a footprint nearly the size of a football field – had a capacity of five million bushels. Freighters laden with grain from the Globe Elevators sailed through the Great Lakes and into the St. Lawrence Seaway to feed people all over North America and as far away as Europe.

First known as “Duluth Elevator Company,” the firm changed its name to “Globe” in 1894.  Twenty-one years later, it became F.H. Peavey & Company. Peavey (now part of ConAgra Foods) abandoned the wooden elevators in 1988 in favor of a new concrete structure.   The Globe Elevators were constructed of wood from the virgin forests of Northern Wisconsin and North-eastern Minnesota. Each building contained about two million board feet of dense, fine-grained lumber, mostly Eastern White Pine. These mammoth structures are among the last of the country’s wooden waterfront granaries, and the forests that produced them are now gone.